Although you can code on Windows, if you then the code is pushed over the the Mac side for compilation and debugging. If you want to do iOS development you will need a Mac of course. Deploying the runtime components took a long time, but after waiting patiently the app launched successfully. I build the sample Employee Directory app and deployed it to an Android emulator which I use for Nexus 7 development. It lacks the bloat of Visual Studio, though you will miss many of the features of Microsoft’s IDE. The IDE itself is clean and fast, and very much code-centric. I downloaded Xamarin Studio, which in my case was around 1.3GB including an updated Android SDK. “It’s our most-requested feature of all time.” said Friedman. The ability to develop for iOS in Visual Studio is new. “Developers have had to resort to putting their logic into shared libraries, and build a per-platform UI. “There’s the one on Silverlight, the one on WPF, the one on Windows RT, and the one on the phone, it’s four,” he says. “What it means is that people need to build a new UI for each platform.” He adds that Microsoft platform developers should be used to this, as Microsoft itself has several similar but incompatible. “We’ve been building tools that essentially project the underlying iOS APIs or Java APIs into C#”, explains co-founder Miguel de Icaza. That’s what users demand now, people want native experiences.” That allows them to share all the non-UI code across platforms, but to deliver a fully native UI, even though the whole app is written in C#. “We tell our developers to separate the UI layer from the rest of the app. “That’s fundamental to our platform,” says Friedman. This is a compromise in terms of the effort involved in supporting multiple platforms, but ensures a native experience on each device. ![]() Xamarin’s philosophy is to share non-visual code, but to create a user interface that is native for each platform. It has a limited app size, and even the sample project I downloaded, an Employee Directory, exceeded that size and I had to register for a trial. Indie is $299 per platform per year, Business is $999 per platform/year, and Enterprise $1800 platform/year. ![]() Xamarin now offers a free Starter edition, and pricing plans for independent developers, smaller businesses, and enterprises.A new component store has pre-built components for download, some free, some commercial.Mono for Android is now called Xamarin.Android.MonoTouch, the framework for iOS, has been renamed Xamarin.iOS.You can now develop iOS apps in Visual Studio for the first time.Xamarin Studio is an updated version of MonoDevelop, the Mono IDE.We can help them take their existing skills and tools, and even code they’ve already written, and bring them to mainstream mobile platforms like iOS and Android.” “There’s a wonderful built-in audience of C# developers, millions of them, who need a bridge to mobile. Together we can make C# a universal language for application development and reach 2.2 billion devices,” Xamarin co-founder and CEO Nat Friedman told me. ![]() “If you look at what you can develop with C#, there’s about 1.2 billion Windows machines out there, but there’s now about a billion Android and iOS devices. On Windows and Windows Phone, the presumption is that developers will continue to use Microsoft’s. Its focus is on mobile platforms, in particular iOS and Android, though there is also support for the Mac. ![]() Xamarin is the company formed around 18 months ago, when Novell discontinued its investment in Mono, a cross-platform implementation of C# and the. Xamarin has announced significant updates to its developer platform.
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